Am I starting a religion

From the IAmAnAtheist.com feedback form:

How can you proclaim to be an atheistic website and yet you post this Atheistic Rights & Responsibilities? Your setting up a code to which atheists “need to follow”, doesn’t that mean you’re attempting to make atheism into its own organized religion? Religion is not restricted to the organized worship of deities, it also includes the worship of ideas. By posting that list, aren’t you solidifying atheism as an organized worship of the idea of no worship? Everything in your atheist version of the ten commandments is basic human behavior of civilized people. Why break that down just for atheists?

You guys are hypocrites, and your imposingness is giving us atheists a bad name.

If their God wins, see you in hell.

To save some time, let’s get this sorted out before we both get to Hell.

I’m going to let you answer the bulk of your own questions, since you are completely correct when you say: “Everything in [the] atheist version of the ten commandments is basic human behavior of civilized people.”

The page says that these are rights and responsibilities every moral atheist has, not that these are rights and responsibilities only for atheists. The point is that even though, as you pointed out, these are things everyone should do, there are some religious people who would speak badly of atheists who did them because we aren’t doing it for the “right” reasons.

The page isn’t a call for organized atheism, but a snarky criticism of the way some theists think.

Proselytize:

5 Responses

Written by Anonymous
on September 21, 2011 at 3:02 am Reply · Permalink

c’mon guys, how can u not believe in God. All of creation is a testimony of His existence

Written by Monimonika
on September 25, 2011 at 10:33 am Reply · Permalink

Since the criteria for being an atheist is just the disbelief (or was it non-belief?) in a god/gods, whether there are religious-like trappings is quite irrelevant. There are such things as atheistic religions.